Everyday Dystopia
Everything is terrible and beautiful and we must dream and stay curious!
I’ve wanted to share my writing publicly for a while, and there’s nothing like a third brush with the plague to remind me that life is short and all our thoughts are silly and stupid and that I should just do it.
Important sidenote: COVID is still very real and deadly and disabling. Don’t let capitalist media interested in maintaining a violent status quo tell you any different. It feels kind of hypocritical writing this, especially since my husband and I most likely got it from traveling internationally while not being perfect about masks. It’s a weird, tiring time, and we all wish we didn’t have to worry about it. I’m 27 and mostly “healthy” (more on why that’s a bullshit label at some point), and my second round of COVID gave me asthma and recurring joint pain. This bout felt less severe, and I’m hoping its effects are minimal.
Over the course of our honeymoon and my husband Ian and I’s subsequent COVID isolation, I read Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee. She surveys utopian, radical experiments in living throughout the millennia, from Pythagoras’ feminist math commune to contemporary Danish cohousing communities to vegan anarchist medieval Christians to the polyamorous Oneida community in 19th century New York. Covering the bases of housing, child rearing, education, property sharing, and family/romantic structures, Ghodsee reminds us that changes in our private sphere can bring beneficial changes to our emotional, spiritual, material, and ecological reality. We’re all feeling so damn anxious and depressed and isolated and no one can buy a house and we’re stuck in jobs we despise; while we work to overthrow the ruling class and build a more equitable post-capitalist society, we can use whatever power we have to restructure our private spheres. Her analyses and historical examples gave me hope and inspiration for imagining and building better lives, especially with far-right politics and climate catastrophe and global pandemics upending our lives more and more.
Then, on the final night of our isolation, Ian and I watched the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror. In it, a tech company cog named Joan has her life adapted to streaming show called “Joan is Awful” in real time, without her knowledge, thanks to an AI supercomputer that can crank out content instantly. Her life predictably falls apart as every unsavory embellished detail of her life is broadcasted to the world through the vessel of a computer-generated Salma Hayek. As Joan tries to fight back against the fake-Netlfix (called Streamberry) responsible, she learns that she herself is not the real Joan, but a fictive layer in the quantum computer as it adapts the life of the real Joan.
Instinctually, intellectually, and spiritually, I don’t like simulation narratives. They make psych ward grippy socks call my name a little too loudly. My nervous system simply cannot comprehend that lack of control, so I sit deadlocked on the couch, the rainbow pinwheel of my mind spinning uncontrollably. I long for a return to a normal sense of control, even if in our capitalist order I have little control over my life, since I still have to make money and get health insurance for me and my husband.
As I read the concluding chapter of Everyday Utopia that night, my panicked brain found solace in her critique of dystopia narratives and the over-saturation of them in our cultural consciousness:
Visions of a bleak future saturate our cultural world and conspire to breed fear and anxiety at the prospect of organizing our lives differently… Dystopian stories are edgy and filled with plot-propelling existential struggles. Action, conflict, and violence titillate audiences and captivate attention. But these cultural products also work to diffuse our dissatisfaction with our present societies, since after all, things could become much worse if we try to change them too drastically. (p 260-261)
So a big fuck you to Black Mirror and Netflix for stirring the collective unconsciousness’ anxiety pot and making me look to present day America for comfort. The episode’s main crime, however, is its blatant plagiarism. When Joan sat with her lawyer to determine how Streamberry could get away with it, a memory hit me like a bold of 2010’s lightening. “She agreed to the terms and conditions without reading them”, I gasped to Ian about 30 seconds before the lawyer repeated those very words. This predicament was the main plot point of a South Park episode from 2011, where Kyle agreed to Apple terms and conditions without reading them, which led to Steve Jobs kidnapping him and two other people to surgically turn the into a Human CentiPad. We watched that episode immediately after finishing Joan is Awful. Ian and I agreed that the South Park episode is better.
Other things of note:
I watched Pee-wee’s Big Adventure with friends over Discord. It was my first time watching it since I was a kid, and I’m convinced it’s the most perfect movie ever.
I also read Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, a chronicle of a fictitious artist/writer/shapeshifter/scammer named X, written by her widow in the wake of her death. It takes place in an alternate U.S. where the South seceded after World War 2 and became a fascist theocracy. The North, meanwhile, had Emma Goldman as a chief advisor to FDR (fucking IMAGINE THAT!!!!!) which lead to marriage equality, universal basic income, universal childcare, universal healthcare, and universal etc. in the 1940s. The book is massively ambitious and kaleidoscopic and I want to read it again armed with pens post-it notes to give Lacey’s writing the full attention it deserves. Also makes me want to read Kathy Acker.
Two good documentary series about Christian evangelicals/fundamentalists/fragile fascist chauvinist douches: Shiny Happy People (about the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting fame and their affiliation with the IBLP) and The Secrets of Hillsong (about a hipster megachurch being unsurprisingly bad). Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity continues to suck and destroy people, both on a national level and on a personal level with the amount of abuse these organizations enable. Content warning for… everything.